m with needles in the name
of the devil. He therefore called on all rulers, secular and
ecclesiastical, to hunt down the miscreants who thus afflicted the
faithful, and he especially increased the powers of inquisitors in
various parts of Europe for this purpose.

The impulse thus given to childish fear and hatred against the
investigation of nature was felt for centuries; more and more chemistry
came to be known as one of the "seven devilish arts."

Thus began a long series of demonstrations against magic from the centre
of Christendom. In 1437, and again in 1445, Pope Eugene IV issued
bulls exhorting inquisitors to be more diligent in searching out and
delivering over to punishment magicians and witches who produced bad
weather, the result being that persecution received a fearful impulse.
But the worst came forty years later still, when, in 1484, there came
the yet more terrible bull of Pope Innocent VIII, known as Summis
Desiderantes, which let inquisitors loose upon Germany, with Sprenger
at their head, armed with the Witch-Hammer, the fearful manual Malleus
Maleficarum, to torture and destroy men and women by tens of thousands
for sorcery and magic. Similar bulls were issued in 1504 by Julius II,
and in 1523 by Adrian VI.

The system of repression thus begun lasted for hundreds of years. The
Reformation did little to change it, and in Germany, where Catholics and
Protestants vied with each other in proving their orthodoxy, it was at
its worst. On German soil more than one hundred thousand victims
are believed to have been sacrificed to it between the middle of the
fifteenth and the middle of the sixteenth centuries.

Thus it was that from St. Augustine to St. Thomas Aquinas, from Aquinas
to Luther, and from Luther to Wesley, theologians of both branches of
the Church, with hardly an exception, enforced the belief in magic and
witchcraft, and, as far as they had power, carried out the injunction,
"Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live."

How this was ended by the progress of scientific modes of thought I
shall endeavour to show elsewhere: here we are only concerned with the
effect of this widespread terrorism on the germs and early growth of the
physical sciences.

Of course, the atmosphere created by this persecution of magicians was
deadly to any open beginnings of experimental science. The conscience of
the time, acting in obedience to the highest authorities of the Church,
and, as was supposed, in defenc